We look to history’s great spiritual leaders and prophets for more than wisdom. They were, after all, able to manifest the divine through miracles of healing, faith, and compassion. When I meditate or pray in their names, I feel closer to the source of such majesty. It humbles me. Holds me. I sometimes feel welcomed into a presence which defies any effort to name or comprehend. Nameless, this essence of totality simply accepts. I am – because it is.
Years ago, as a medical student, I learned how to study the human body and its constituent parts. There are lots of components to this thing we call life. Even forty years ago, there was far more than could be memorized. Still, my classmates and I tried. We peered through microscopes, dissected through layers of physical matter, and analyzed various formulae. We learned to observe, to identify patterns, and then to assign names to those patterns, prescribe treatment methods for disrupted functions and behavior, and adjust those methods in response to observed changes in the original patterns. It’s not a bad system. In fact, it often works quite well, especially for medical problems and conditions that nicely fit frequently observed disease constellations.
But the approach is sometimes challenged by situations without an obvious pattern, as well as experiences that do not neatly take the shape of expected illness or recovery. There are people who worsen when they should get better. There are others who get better when things should have deteriorated.
We didn’t much discuss miracles in my training. The word suggested religion or, at the very least, spirituality. Admitting to a belief system that incorporated spirituality could bring frowns and annoyance. Hope in Allah, Yahweh, or God was no substitute for the right antibiotic or prescription. The scientific standard, even one that referenced the “biopsychosocial”, rendered unto religion what was indeterminate, and unto medicine what was measurable.
So no one said anything when they felt the spirit leave a dying body and hover in the upper right corner of the room. We didn’t dare mention aloud the powerful sensation that something else was involved in a decision to order a certain test, continue a certain therapy, or simply to stand by, allowing healing that was well beyond our individual capability to occur. A conversation about faith was for the priest, rabbi, or religious advisor. We stood on the ground of science. Unfortunately, because it was not the higher ground, our vision was often obstructed.
Thus far in my lifetime, I have witnessed many miracles. Some have been medical, while others have been part of the so-called everyday fabric of experience. None of these miracles have been my doing. All have been inexplicable – when viewed through the limited refraction of the lens we call science. The more I am able to slow, however, to witness and to accept uncertainty, the less hazy that lens seems, the less disconnected I feel to the greater power flowing through and around me, and the less resistant I am to name something otherwise unpredictable as marvelous, even miraculous. Spirit moves in and around us. Physics calls that spirit ‘dark energy’. Religion calls it the Creator. My soul calls it a welcome comfort of wonder.
Four decades ago, I stood before a microscope in histology laboratory and learned to recognize human cells based on staining and other coloration techniques. I never learned how to properly use a binocular scope; it was easier to close one eye and avoid feeling dizzy while quickly spying inside the microscopic world of cellular pathology, searching for abnormality. The lesson was always there to be found, because that was the point of the teaching exercise. And so I went hunting in monocular fashion, sufficiently naming the errors to pass the class and move onto more macroscopic considerations of human health. Nonetheless, the real action, I was taught, lay at the cellular level. That was where medications worked. It was where cancer developed. It was how the fundamental workings of the body could be explored, understood, and manipulated. That is where, someone once declared, “God lives”.
I think God lives a higher level. For just as a single cell in a solitary tissue that makes up one organ that is part of an individual human body cannot comprehend the workings of the entire body, its state of health, and from whence the energy that flows to that cell arises, neither can a single human in one family unit living in an individual city on the third rock from a central sun in the Milky Way galaxy ever expect to understand how all this works, where it all comes from, where it all is heading, and who is responsible for its more marvelous features. Despite this, that single cell, and the human in which it resides, can recognize their roles. They can enfold themselves in the good fortune of being part of something grand and sometimes glorious. They can smile at miracles when and as such miracles manifest.
And so I turn – right now, in this moment, through the asynchrony of the miraculous – and I smile at you.
Good one, Mark! I had the same problem you did with the binocular scope in that very same lab at the very same time. (In my case, very poor eyesight in the right eye…)
Albert Einstein said, ” “There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
Thanks for writing–
Check out “The Case For Miracles” by Lee Strobel. Educated at Yale undergrad and a Yale Law School Grad, he was an investigative journalist for the Chicago Tribune. Once an Atheist, now no-longer.
I echo Rich, Good One.